France Sends 70,000 Police Against Protest Wave

French authorities deployed up to 70,000 police officers and gendarmes on Saturday as hundreds of thousands marched over living costs, inequality, school conditions and public services. The Interior Ministry counted 410,000 demonstrators nationwide, including 110,000 in Paris; the CGT estimated nearly 800,000 nationally and 250,000 in the capital. The scale of the response was clear: authorities changed routes, restricted central areas and police used tear gas and water cannon.

A march, rerouted by authorities

In Paris, authorities banned the originally agreed route between Place de la Bastille and Place de la Nation. The march instead travelled from Porte d’Italie to Porte de Vincennes along the Boulevards des Marechaux. Police said the main march reached its destination without incident, though clashes and police use of tear gas and water cannon were reported at its end and in other cities.

The demonstrations were called by a coalition involving the Yellow Vests movement, trade unions and students. Students, teachers, ecologists, nurses, union representatives, families, office workers and retirees joined them. Their grievances began with school conditions and staff shortages, then widened to living costs, inequality and the government. Students have demanded more teachers, repairs to schools and universities, an end to selection through Parcoursup, 250,000 additional higher-education places, an extra 200 euros a month in student grants and a rent freeze in public-student housing.

The figures behind those demands come from the state’s own records. Public middle and high schools lost 15.4 million teaching hours in the 2024-25 school year because schools didn’t replace absent teachers, equal to 7.5% of scheduled teaching time, according to Education Ministry figures. INSEE reported that energy prices were 21.3% higher in September than a year earlier, contributing to overall inflation of 3.1%.

Security measures and street-level consequences

Authorities said they had underestimated the previous weekend’s unrest and deployed 10,000 more officers than the week before, a 20% increase. The operation included RAID, an elite police unit usually assigned to counterterrorism and other high-risk interventions, as well as helicopters, armoured vehicles and water cannons. Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said RAID officers would support police operations but wouldn’t directly control crowds.

Nunez said police arrested 135 people nationwide by early afternoon and accused far-left activists and criminal gangs of seeking to foment violence. A later Al Jazeera account reported him saying police had arrested “nearly 1,000” people nationwide. France 24 reported 65 arrests during the Paris demonstration, where police said they had stopped and checked more than 3,000 people. Authorities said 500 “rioters” clashed with law enforcement agents in Paris, with violence below the level of the previous weekend.

David, a demonstrator bleeding after a baton blow, told AFP: “The police started moving towards everyone, telling them to get down and back off. They were just taking people down, you know, beating protesters.” Police restrictions also drew criticism from rights groups and unions. Amnesty International France said the security escalation came “at the expense of our freedoms,” endangering the right to demonstrate peacefully. Union representative Murielle Guilbert called the route ban “scandalous,” saying President Emmanuel Macron had forbidden protesters from demonstrating “where we wish to demonstrate.”

Police used tear gas in Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand, Strasbourg, Lille, Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse, and water cannon in Nice and Nantes. Clashes were reported in Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand, Lille, Nice, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Toulouse and Strasbourg. In Marseille, police counted 17,000 marchers while unions estimated 100,000; clashes continued into the evening.

The demands haven’t gone away

Demonstrators voiced anger at the security response as well as their material conditions. Clara Lebbadi, a 22-year-old arts student, said: “We shed tears for shops, not for the people who are being impoverished all year round.” She added that she and a friend came despite being scared “because it’s important not to let repression win.” Soumaya Abed, a nurse wearing a red CGT union vest, said: “They are using what happened last week as an excuse to quiet protesters.”

Macron met student representatives on Friday for the first time since the protests began and promised more teachers and a deep overhaul of Parcoursup. Student representatives said the meeting hadn’t eased tensions and called for further mobilisation until concrete measures were announced. The Yellow Vests said they would demonstrate again on October 31, with rallies and a sit-in outside parliament and city halls nationwide against what they call the government’s “authoritarian drift” and in defence of “public freedoms.”